BR 









If 4^'^t^>^ 











JOHN JAY Cf1 



A 




Class . 
Book. 



:km 



()op}Tight]s^"_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



I 



NOTES ON RELIGION 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Homeric Scenes: Hector's Fare- 
well and The Wrath of Achilles. 

1 6 mo. :: :: 60 cents 



NOTES 

ON 

RELIGION 



BY 

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 
n 




NEW YORK 

LAURENCE J. GOMME 

1915 



.as 



COPYMGHT, I915, BY 

LAURENCE J. GOMME 



JAN 26 im 



^ 






CONTENTS 

i 

"^^ PACK 

^ I. The Roman Church i 

II. The Effect of Hebraic Thought on 

Western Europe 49 

III. The Indestructibility of Religion . 60 

IV. Memories and Half-Thoughts . . 62 

I. Do Not Go in Search of Religion . 63 

II. Teaching a Child .... 65 

III. Institutions 66 

IV. Many Mansions 68 

V. The Words of Christ .... 69 

VI. Modern Science and Christian Sci- 
ence 70 

VII. The Message of Christianity . . 72 

VIII. The Mystical Body of Christ . . 73 

IX. The Salvation. Tolstoi. Nietzsche. 75 

X. Theology 83 

XL The Love of God .... 84 

XIL Moods . . ... . . 84 

XIII. Horace 85 

XIV. Apparent Hiatus .... 85 
XV. East or West 86 

XVI. The Porches to the Temple of Truth 87 

XVII. Sacrifice and Burnt Offerings . . 89 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

I 

THE ROMAN CHURCH 

I STOOD in a fertile mead full of flowers ; and 
I looked across and saw an old city with its 
walls and battlements, — what was left of 
them,— an old mediaeval city. And the ram- 
parts of the city were broken, and through 
them I sa^ the gigantic wreck of a great 
church. And the great central church was 
surrounded by lesser domes and naves which 
seemed its offshoots. There were many of 
them, and the plan of the one warred with 
the plan of the next ; and many were in ruins, 
and the great church itself was damaged but 
services were still going on in it and in them. 
The great church was the Roman Catholic 
Church and the lesser buildings were its off- 
spring, the Protestant Churches of Europe. 

And thus standing in the meadow and look- 
ing across four centuries, I viewed the Roman 
church and I knew that all those intermediate 
walls and structures which had risen and been 
demolished, risen again and again been de- 
I 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

moHshed during the four centuries that lay be- 
tween my own time and the last fall of the 
Roman Empire, had been necessary in order 
to give foreground, necessary to make any sur- 
vey possible of a thing so vast, so familiar, so 
universal, so intimately a part of myself as the 
Roman Catholic Church. We cannot see great 
things while we stand near to them. Time 
must broaden the moat according to the size 
of the castle. And this cathedral which housed 
western Europe for a thousand years must be 
viewed from a distance; nay, it must be seen 
in a perspective that shall take in a still re- 
moter past. In order to make any guess at 
the place which such an institution holds in 
our own epoch, we must look backward, — 
very far backward, — back to Christ, back to 
Abraham and the Mosaic Dispensation. 

In all this matter we are dealing with the 
influence of Christ. His power shines not 
only forward down through the centuries, ap- 
pearing in history as Christianity, but it also 
casts light backward upon that Jewish history 
and religion out of which he stepped. Christ 
himself is bigger than Christianity, and makes 
us forget it, when we see him. He does the 
same for Jewish History. He is the point at 
which the two met. If occasionally I shall 
speak of the Old and New Testaments as of 

2 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

a single Dispensation, I do so for convenience^ 
and also to accentuate what they have in com- 
mon. No doubt if Christ had never lived, the 
Qld Testament would never have been heard 
of except by scholars. It might perhaps have 
exercised a literary influence upon Europe; 
but its deeper imports would not have been 
discerned. Yet now that we have read all 
those old sacred books as the background of 
Christ, they are seen to be a part of him. 
More than this, it was with this light upon 
them that they reached Europe; so that we 
may say that, so far as Europe is concerned, 
his light has shined through them always. The 
Old and New Testaments may then, for cer- 
tain purposes, be viewed as a single influence. 
The chief miracle with regard to the older 
Hebrew literature is that the books should 
have come down to us in such genuine condi- 
tion. What a race of angels the old Jews 
must have been, to preserve these volumes 
in their purity, and to keep them open to the 
public as they seem always to have done. 
There in the temple lay the great writings 
from generation to generation of Jewish His- 
tory, and every scholar had access to them; 
and every man on the streets of Jerusalem 
could discuss them. About them, to be sure, 
grew up various schools of interpretation. But 

3 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

no one endeavoured to make these sacred 
books into instruments of political oppression. 
Or if anyone did so the tremendous intellectual 
power of the individual Hebrew soon de- 
feated the attempt. The Jews were a race of 
mental athletes, as every page of the Old Tes- 
tament proves. Had there been successful tyr- 
anny, it would have come about through the 
growing up of a secret priesthood and the 
withholding of the Scriptures from the people. 

It is a strange fact that as soon as these 
Scriptures became known to western Europe, 
as soon as the power of the Jewish Scriptures 
became apparent, their serviceability as an in- 
strument of government was seen. So terrible 
was the power of Jewish thought over the un- 
sophisticated western world, that rulers could 
not resist the temptation to use this thought 
for purposes of government. One might say 
that no European has ever been quite able to 
resist this temptation. You can to-day hardly 
find a Sunday-school teacher who will trust 
the Bible to do its own work: he must pre- 
empt it. He builds his little fence about it, 
and holds the gate himself. 

The Bible contains a summary of man's 

emotional nature, it gives a sort of cue to the 

riddle of life. The ideas in it are few; but 

they agree with each other and they are illus- 

4 



NOTES ON RElIgION 

trated with so much variety, with such living 
power and such miraculous depth of thought 
that few minds can withstand its appeal. The 
Hebraic point of view, the Hebraic concep- 
tion of life, expressed the spiritual needs of 
man, his sentiments, his aspirations, his rela- 
tion to God so much more truly than any 
other philosophies that the Jewish Scriptures 
for a time superseded all other learning in 
Europe. The mystical inner logic, and iden- 
tity of feeling (which makes all this Hebraic 
. folk-lore operate as a solid unity of power), 
as well as the extraordinary portability of 
the Bible (which can be packed in a box), 
laid western Europe at the mercy of Israel. 
Nothing extant could resist it. Judaism was 
destined to replace other religions much as 
good astronomy replaces bad astronomy, or 
good physics, bad physics. The popularity 
of the Hebrew Scriptures made it necessary 
that they should be adopted as the basis of 
society. They were at once put into service 
as an instrument of government, — the instru- 
ment of government of the Roman Empire. 

The abuses of the Roman church have al- 
ways grown out of the necessities of govern- 
ment; and they can invariably be detached 
.from the Scriptures upon which they are 
founded and to which they cling like lichens. 

5 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

I call them "abuses/' — one might more prop- 
erly call them "uses''; for they were simply 
devices which were useful, indeed necessary 
to the church's supremacy. The first of these 
abuses was the incorporation into the Catholic 
church of the old Roman religion, the accept- 
ance by the church of the pomp and ritual 
which formed an historic part of the Roman 
imagination. This ecclesiastical pomp with its 
elaborate ceremonies was modeled upon classic 
tradition. From the point of view of historic 
continuity the successorship of the Roman 
Catholic Church to the Roman Empire is the 
most interesting fact in history. The old Ro- 
man ritual, the Roman spirit of obedience, the 
Roman worship of external display, and the 
Roman passion for universal domination have 
been delivered over to the modern world in 
unbroken continuity. Yet, of course, all of 
these things have come to occupy towards the 
modern world a strange and incongruous rela- 
tion. 

From the point of view of Biblical history 
the incorporation of the old Roman religion 
into a theocracy based on Israel was a some- 
what revolting piece of stage work, through 
which the mysteries of the soul were trans- 
formed into political agencies, and men were 
brought into a superstitious obedience. When- 
6 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

ever we feel impelled to condemn the Ro- 
man church as the practicer of a degrading 
form of tyranny, let us remember that she 
is merely pursuing a course which she en- 
tered on in the fourth century. Her officers 
cannot understand what is wrong with the 
practice. They know nothing else. 

One cannot help wondering how the Hebrew 
prophet would have viewed this outcome of 
Israel's influence, how the intellectual per- 
son, Isaiah, or John the Baptist, or St. Paul, 
would have felt towards this outcome of his 
labors. In spite of the extraordinary grasp of 
human things which Christ everywhere shows, 
I cannot find any intimation that he himself 
foresaw such an outcome as, for instance, 
the Society of Jesus. I cannot find in the 
Gospels any fear of political tyranny or much 
interest in the details of the way in which 
spiritual laws work out. Christ seems to be 
trying to get through the day each day, and 
to deliver his message of the law, perhaps to 
allow the law to speak for itself. But the fol- 
lowers of Christ had to deal with the cyclones 
which he had brought on. These forces which 
Christ somehow released, or which were re- 
leased through him and through the Jewish 
Dispensation behind him, must, it was felt, 
be explained a little, controlled a little, and 
7 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

guided a little. St. Paul therefore inaugurates 
a sort of metaphysic and a sort of parish 
discipline, both of them very mild, and on a 
small scale. The Roman church very soon 
found that in order to secure obedience she 
must interpose something between the Scrip- 
tures and the believer. How else could she 
control him? The exciting power of the 
Scriptural ideas was obvious; but the direc- 
tion which that excitement might take was 
very uncertain. For instance, one common 
result of Jewish influence has always been 
to arouse contempt for civil authority. It 
seemed like dealing out firearms to a mob to 
give such teaching as this to the people at 
large. The whole instruction must therefore 
be manacled, the head of power in the stream 
must be harnessed. Out of this discovery of 
the need of harness there grew up every single 
one of the thousandfold dogmas, customs, rit- 
uals, exercises, theories of conduct, theories 
of theology, exposition of texts, manuals of 
devotion, organizations of the Hierarchy, 
rules of precedence, spiritual claims, temporal 
claims; — also all relaxations and indulgences, 
all exceptions to rules, theories for avoiding 
the application of rules, alternative practices 
and inner doctrines; — the whole incredible 
and complex metaphysic of government which 
8 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

fifty generations of Roman rulers have 
evolved out of the changing needs in the prac- 
tical government of that great machine, the 
Roman Catholic Church. One key unlocks 
the rationale of every Roman doctrine and 
practice. 

All of these things are instruments of gov- 
ernment and can only be intelligently con- 
sidered if viewed in this light. These doc- 
trines and practices, however, are not acci- 
dental or arbitrary things; they have not 
been made out of theory. They have each 
been developed out of a need, evolved from 
conditions, distilled by the natural heat of hu- 
manity and crystallized in the natural pressure 
of events. Every one of them is an organic 
product, potent, wonderful, having something 
of magic in it, — the magic of experience. 
These instruments of government have come 
down to our times with the Roman church: 
they are the Roman church. 

Let us now consider what are the functions 
of a government. Those functions are to tax, 
to regulate justice, to control education, to set- 
tle the status of citizens, etc., etc. The matter 
of taxation is vital. How far any government 
shall go in taxing or in controlling men is a 
matter of circumstances. The Roman Curia, 
through a policy, which as I shall show in a 
9 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

moment was sound worldly policy, has always 
claimed absolute and illimitable control. In 
the gradual loss of the world, which the Curia 
has been suffering since the thirteenth cen- 
tury, her attitude of absolute claim has not 
changed. This policy was fixed by her docu- 
ments and by her practices; it could not be 
changed. It has persisted from the era when 
emperors knelt at her feet, down to this day. 
The claim to govern is always the same. It 
covers Life and Death. It covers every cir- 
cumstance touching body or soul, whether in 
this world or in the next. How far that claim 
can be enforced at any period has always 
been a matter of circumstance. 

I would, however, point out to the Protes- 
tant that the Roman church has never been 
fond of tyranny, and has resorted to strong 
measures only when compelled to do so by 
worldly considerations. Heresy has been heav- 
ily punished only when circumstances made 
heresy treason. The Albigenses, for instance, 
laughed at the Roman officials, and were es- 
tablishing an independent civilization for 
themselves. So, also, throughout Catholic 
history individual persons have often been 
allowed to hold doctrines which were funda- 
mentally at war with Roman dogma, because 
the circumstances o^ ^he age did not make 

10 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

the matter into a political issue. For instance, 
in the times before the Reformation, the 
Catholic church was full of mystics who must 
have been condemned if they had existed a 
century or two later. These mystics were sub- 
stantially Protestants; they lived in a union 
with God which required no interposition of 
the church. Their immunity need not sur- 
prise us. We all know that in ordinary politi- 
cal life, some event which excites no attention, 
in one year will raise a riot in the next. So 
it is with the history of persecution. Perse- 
cution is always controlled by the imaginative, 
political fears of the persecutor. Severe per- 
secutions always represent panic. After a 
split has once occurred in an organization, 
straws and feathers become symbols of the 
controversy. Therefore in the era before the 
Reformation, there was greater practical free- 
dom, greater scope for personal feeling in 
religion than has since been permissible in the 
Roman Church; and anyone who wishes to 
acquire a right feeling about the Roman re- 
ligion ought to grow familiar with the Ca- 
tholicism which prevailed when all the world 
was Catholic. Here are the sources from 
which many good Catholics draw their inspira- 
tion, and their piety differs in little but name 
from much of Protestant piety. So long as it 
II 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

is satisfied with the practical loyalty of its 
members that church does not tease them, and 
has never teased them about doctrines. Doc- 
trines and dogmas are put forth only as a 
means of quelling insurgency. After the or- 
ganization has experienced some unpleasant 
internal dissension the philosophic result is 
condensed into a dogma so as to padlock the 
future. Thus the first creed was adopted by 
the Apostles as a test of loyalty: they had 
been through a dangerous disagreement or 
they never would have started a creed. So, 
also, the Nicene Creed was adopted in order 
to control the organization. So in recent times 
the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception 
and of the Papal Infallibility were promul- 
gated in order to stifle certain liberals who 
had been giving trouble inside of the organi- 
zation. A dogma always shows that there 
has been a tempest. 

Of course after there has been such an 
unpleasantness, the embers which it leaves be- 
hind it are hot and treacherous : certain words 
and names have come to carry implications 
of horror. So, for instance, the term quietism 
to-day implies the most dreadful heresy in 
Catholic circles because it very picturesquely 
and briefly describes a kind of piety which was 
practised with impunity in the fourteenth 

12 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

century but which led in the seventeenth to 
serious persecutions. In regard to Quietism, 
a point of extraordinary interest was illus- 
trated in the history of this heresy, — namely 
the point that the church itself cannot tell 
whether a doctrine is heretical or not, until 
time proves whether or not the doctrine leads 
to the weakening of the church's political 
power. 

The Spiritual Guide of Molinos was pub- 
lished in 1675. It contained two ideas, each 
of which Molinos believed in with an absolute 
faith, and which were nevertheless in the last 
analysis destructive of one another. The first 
idea was the idea of the direct union of the 
soul with God, — a union so close as to make a 
priesthood unnecessary, — the second was the 
idea of the authority of the church. The 
enormous popularity of the first idea, and the 
spread of a sect founded upon it seemed to 
threaten the power of the church. But the 
Inquisition, which made a formal inquest upon 
Molinos' teachings in 1682, found the second 
idea (the supremacy of the church), so faith- 
fully and sincerely upheld by Molinos that his 
Spiritual Guide was approved. As time went 
on, however, it was discovered that the practi- 
cal effect of Molinos' influence was to weaken 
the Papacy and to create a new quasi-Protes- 

13 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

tant sect. Molinos was accordingly, in 1685, 
imprisoned. His subsequent trial, persecution, 
death, and defamation form one of the worst 
pages in Church history. 

It may be well to note here an idea which is 
inconceivable to the Protestant imagination, 
and obvious to the Catholic imagination and 
which floats down the ages with the whole 
Roman controversy. Its last appearance may 
be noted in the pamphlets of the Modernists 
who are continuing to illustrate it to Europe. 
The idea is that a thing can both be and not 
be. The good Catholic believes his soul to 
be in direct union with God. And yet the 
church is between them. The two ideas of 
Molinos' contradict one another. 

Molinos submitted : he was led into the 
presence of the brilliant assembly which had 
been convened to witness his humiliation, at- 
tired in a penitential garb and holding a burn- 
ing torch between his bound hands. Molinos 
was thus true to his second idea, — the abso- 
lute supremacy of the church. "Good-bye, 
Father," he said to the Dominican who was 
leading him off to imprisonment for life, "we 
shall meet again on the Judgment Day, and 
then it will be seen if the truth was on your 
side or on mine." Let it be noted that the 
ceremonial submission of Molinos was not 

14 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

like the submission of Socrates, or the submis- 
sion of Christ, or the submission of Galileo — 
all of whom retained the right of private judg- 
ment and submitted only to the punishment or 
to the ceremony. Molinos submits to the rea- 
son of the punishment: he recants. And yet 
he appeals. The intellect which is able to re- 
cant after this manner, — which is able to con- 
ceive of a thing as being both true and not 
true at the same time, has received an injury 
in early life from which it has never recov- 
ered. This is the injury which the Roman 
church inflicts upon the brains of her adher- 
ents. Unless this injury be inflicted, the man 
is not a true Catholic; he is not sure to re- 
main a Catholic. If it be cured, he cannot 
remain a Catholic in the papal sense of the 
word. So subtly do men vary in their re- 
ligious experiences that some Catholics who 
feel very clearly their personal union with 
God, do upon excommunication, smile at the 
church; others grieve, others go forward and 
back, now proclaiming allegiance and again 
becoming aware of their independence. 

All of these individual spiritual experiences 
are part of the history of Christianity. As 
they become massed into political forces, or 
become visible as popular movements, history 
deals with them and history is obliged to use 

IS 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

every shift and engine of philosophic thought 
in order to deal with its cloudy material. Be- 
hind the clouds, however, are the men and 
women of the past. In considering the disrup- 
tion of the old Roman hierarchy, we are 
obliged at one moment to have in mind the 
worldly frame of government, and at the 
next, the spiritual conditions of men. 

The new states and nations which were 
growing up out of the Roman Empire found 
that there was no room for national feeling 
within the old Roman system. They had to 
fight their way out of it. The new nationali- 
ties became a species of competing religions, 
intricately bound up with doctrinal questions 
and with practical politics. If heresy was a 
kind of treason to the church, — so also the 
payment of Peter's pence to the church be- 
came a kind of heresy to the new national 
feeling. I confess that I have been follow- 
ing the fashion of contemporary historians in 
putting forward the secular aspect of the 
matter. This aspect is always the most vis- 
ible of the two; because patriotism and na- 
tional politics are things which the modern 
mind easily imagines; whereas the attach- 
ments of religious feeling are but faintly 
understood by us to-day. The struggle, how- 
ever, always bears two interpretations. It 
i6 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

can be thought of as a struggle for temporal 
power going on among the rulers ; and again, 
as an inward, religious, and ethical struggle 
going on within the hearts of individuals. 
One must be on one's guard against those 
modern historians who write a history of re- 
ligion and leave religion out. 

The form in which religious disturbance 
arose was somewhat as follows: — Certain 
pious citizens were perhaps living in a Ger- 
man, French, or English mediaeval city, pay- 
ing their money regularly to Rome and obey- 
ing her humbly. Among these men, however, 
there arose new curiosities, new sciences, new 
learning, new individual piety, and all of these 
things weakened the allegiance of the citizens 
to Rome, and played into the hands of the 
new national governments which were just 
arising based upon geography, law, and lan- 
guage. 

No doubt the beginnings of anti-Roman in- 
fluence could be traced straight back to an- 
tiquity. It was, however, not till the time 
of the Reformation that the new forces pre- 
vailed. The old Roman Empire fell and mod- 
ern Europe was born. The great Cathedral of 
Mediaeval Civilization could not be entirely 
demolished all at once; but the outer walls 
were taken and the first series of never end- 
17 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

ing demolitions and reconstructions of the 
ramparts was begun. Ever since that time 
both sides have been working Hke ants over 
the pile, — the demolishers striving to complete 
their work of destruction, the defenders, to 
save as much as possible of the sacred edi- 
fice. 

The important thing to understand is that 
the whole controversy in all its forms, and 
through all the ages, hinges upon the same 
idea, the same conflict of claim in the breast 
of the individual. For instance: — You have 
a Roman Catholic friend. How far will he 
obey the church? That depends. If he is a 
converted pagan of the fourth century, he will 
be almost sure to obey it; but not altogether 
so. If too much be required of him, he will 
resist. If your friend is a modern person, 
a teacher, for example in the public school 
of to-day and a good Catholic, he will tend 
to obey his church ; but not altogether so. He 
would not perhaps favor putting Roman Cath- 
olic flags on an American town hall. He 
would very likely not concede the extreme 
claims of the church to control all the educa- 
tion in the world. He will act according to 
circumstances. If his private interests and 
his personal feelings are greatly outraged by 
some claims which the church makes upon 
i8 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

him, he will throw over the church altogether 
as was done by so many people during the 
Reformation. 

The practical problem of the Roman church 
is forever the same, i. e. that of getting men 
to give money, and to give obedience. Yet 
the problem is ever varying, — How much 
money? How much obedience? Now, as the 
outward and practical problem remains the 
same throughout the ages, so does the in- 
ward and spiritual problem upon which all 
hinges, remain always the same. The religious 
consciousness, the personal relation of a man 
to God, that is the first idea. The authority of 
the church, her right to intervene between 
the individual soul and God, — that is the sec- 
ond idea. It was, therefore, by no accident 
but out of inevitable necessity that the case of 
Molinos which I referred to a few moments 
ago, exhibited to us both of these elements 
which are essentially irreconcilable, and which 
go on contending forever as Jacob and Ishmael 
contended together in the womb. 

So long as these two principles are contend- 
ing in the silent soul of some individual we 
cannot see them, — they are politically unim- 
portant. The church is therefore able to be 
indulgent towards the sufferer. The church is 
able to make its yoke easy in individual cases. 

19 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

The experience of fourteen hundred years has 
provided the theory for every sort of private 
indulgence. The result is that so far as doc- 
trine or conduct is concerned, one may be a 
good Catholic and believe or do almost any- 
thing, so long as one concedes the authority 
of the church. 

One cannot, of course, remain a good Cath- 
olic and yet refuse to submit. If you refuse to 
submit, you become a symbol of opposition: 
your case takes on an enormous significance at 
once. You must be put down, — burned or ex- 
communicated, — because for the church to re- 
frain from doing so is for the curia to abandon 
its claim and to abdicate. This metaphysical 
claim is the symbol of a power so very awful 
that you, individually, have to be burned. 
They may love you, but they are obliged to 
burn you. You, on your side, by being burned 
are doing your maximum of protest. Both 
Bruno and the Pope who burns Bruno are 
playing fortissimo : each has thrown double 
sixes. By this method of fighting, the curia 
retains its imaginative position, retains the 
power, if it is losing in one place, to build 
itself up elsewhere. The Roman church re- 
gards itself as the custodian of the Jewish 
Scriptures — i. e. of all kinds of truth. To 
make any compromise about this, to concede 
20 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

rights to science, or to scholarship, or to in- 
dividual piety, would be to cast away the di- 
vining rod with which it claims to find the liv- 
ing waters for humanity. Moreover, the 
church is an organization. Individual kings 
have sometimes abdicated, but no organiza- 
tion has ever abdicated; and beside this, the 
whole battery of Catholic philosophy, dogma, 
ritual, and discipline makes any such course 
impossible for the Roman church. The old 
Roman machinery and paraphernalia of gov- 
ernment can only work in one way. The men 
educated in that tradition can only act in one 
way. If anything is certain in this world it is 
that the Roman church cannot ever become 
Liberal. The Catholic liberals of all ages 
(quite recently the Modernists), are always 
obliged to submit, because they concede some 
general powers of government to Rome. Of 
course Rome will name the limits of those 
powers, and when she does so, these gentle- 
men must submit or leave the church. 

Let us now reflect upon a strange matter. 
The ideas, nay, even the words and images 
of this whole controversy remain much the 
same throughout the ages. But the substance 
changes. A few years ago I read that very 
truthful book, Fogazzaro's novel, II Santo, 
which is devoted to showing the embarrass- 

21 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

ment into which the Papacy must be thrown 
to-day by the appearance of a saint. The 
book appears to the Protestant mind to be 
an indictment of Catholic practices; and I 
believe that the aged and very distinguished 
author was obliged to humiliate himself and 
to recant in some way. The thing which most 
impressed me, however, about the story was 
that the most frightful powers of the Ro- 
man church had vanished. The Santo, who 
resists all temptations and avoids all snares, 
should logically have been burnt in the mar- 
ket-place. And yet, so far as I could find out, 
all that the pontiff of the story did to the 
Saint was to beg him to "move on." The Saint 
became an unpleasant figure at the door of 
the Vatican; and so the Church persuaded 
him to remove himself and to live in disgrace 
at Sorrento. I began to reflect inwardly as 
to this unexpected ending of the novel; and 
I wondered who was to blame, and who was 
responsible for this change in Roman condi- 
tions, and why it was that the Saint could 
not be conveniently burned to-day in the 
market-place. And it seemed to me upon 
reflection that the whole modern world was 
the unity which controlled the situation. One 
would never find this out through any process 
of reasoning. There is something outside of 

22 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

our reasoning which controls us and makes 
us what we are. 

There is something outside of even the 
Roman Catholic Church which controls her 
and makes her what she is. She also and 
in spite of her history is a part of the pres- 
ent, and it is merely in order to find out her 
relation to this present that I have been study- 
ing the past. So, also, each individual is not 
merely a thing of to-day. Each of us does 
consciously or unconsciously represent in him- 
self the whole process of humanity. We 
cannot separate ourselves from the past; we 
can only seek to establish our true relation 
to it. The Catholic church in all its disinte- 
grations should be regarded as a crumbling 
unity. It is the greatest historic residuum 
in the world, the most perfect piece of the 
past, and it gives us a more accurate measure 
for judging of the past than any other extant 
institution. It is made up, as we have seen, 
of two very separable elements : — the love of 
God, and the control of men. The first is the 
divine and mystical portion which can be un- 
derstood only by those who have personal ex- 
perience of religion. The second is the 
work-a-day element which every one can un- 
derstand. It consists in the using of influ- 
ence over men to secure particular ends. All 

23 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

governments do this, sometimes gently, some- 
times cruelly, sometimes with horrible tyranny. 
The thing itself, however, needs no explana- 
tion. We all understand it. 

It is the union of true religion with a per- 
fected system of social tyranny that gives the 
Roman church its particular character. I do 
not hesitate to call that religion "true" which 
gives a man an abiding consciousness of God. 
I know that true religion in this sense com- 
bines well and easily with every form of 
vice, ambition, and cruelty whether Protestant 
or Catholic. Nevertheless, it seems to me that 
the consciousness of God is just so much truth, 
and should be so regarded for clarity's sake: 
the evil part can then be considered by itself. 

The object of the Roman Catholic Church 
in its governmental capacity is to confuse these 
two elements. The Church Dominant says to 
a man: "I am your consciousness of God; 
therefore obey." This involves a confusion 
of mind and upon that confusion rests the 
whole structure. 

In writing the opening account of the Ro- 
man church in this paper, I could not help 
feeling that the Roman Catholic layman would 
read it with a smile; because my paper ap- 
pears to deal with externals, with the history, 
the bells, the pomp, etc., — and I seem to leave 
24 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

out of account the one little hot thread of 
heart's devotion which really holds the whole 
church together— I mean the approach to 
Christ through the Sacraments. I look daily 
upon the faces of Roman Catholic women, and 
see often a depth of quiet devotion that ex- 
plains life to them and makes them happy. 
These women are not sunk in a brutish super- 
stition. They are holy people. "What then? 
What would you have? Where is the evil?" 
The evil lies in the support which all good 
Catholics, including these saints, give and must 
give to some of the most horrible iniquities 
of the world. In order to understand the 
matter you must take a cross-section of society. 
You must take the dollar given by the de- 
vout Boston housemaid and trace it into the 
pocket of the Catholic spy in Berlin. 

I do not devote this paper to laying bare the 
historic abuses of the Roman church, but to 
explaining the principle at the bottom of 
them. Those abuses are very familiar to us 
all. No Catholic denies them. They multiply 
in each generation according to the complexion 
of the age. They are, on the other hand, the 
means through which humanity is saved from 
Rome because, by the operation of natural law, 
Rome always uses methods which a little 
shock the world's conscience. As the world 
25 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

improves, Rome improves; but the relation 
remains. 

Classic antiquity knew no such wickedness 
as was revealed to us during the Middle 
Ages. Before Christ had showed new depths 
in human goodness the corresponding depths 
of iniquity could not be imagined. 

The object of this paper is to spread the 
news that all the abuses of the Roman Church 
are made possible only through their connec- 
tion with a sentiment which is holy. We must 
remember these things in regarding the pres- 
ent ; we must remember them in reviewing the 
past. We must wade through the worst acts 
of the Inquisition in the sixteenth century or 
stand over the dreadful history of Naples in 
the nineteenth without forgetting that all this 
crime, horror, and tyranny is a perversion 
of a divine intuition in the hearts of men. 
This is the evil, — this spiritual perversion ; not 
theft, not the rack, not the jail, not the ex- 
ternals of tyranny which show so plainly in 
history, but the invisible intercepting of 
Christ's message at the source, and the maim- 
ing of minds at the birth. 

You can not, to be sure, save the Papacy 
even by this reasoning. The Papacy will cling 
to its abuses, which grow fainter with the cen- 
turies and as Europe becomes better policed. 
26 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

You can probably never rescue the Papacy and 
make it into a mere spiritual dominion, seek- 
ing no money, seeking only salvation for men. 
But by remembering the truth in which all 
this mass of error is founded, you can re- 
tain a true relation to a very large portion of 
humanity both living and dead, and can avoid 
establishing a relation towards Catholicism 
which is both dogmatic and inhuman. 

I confess that in Europe passion has always 
ruled the day, and Religion herself has very 
generally been lost in the scuffle, during the 
wars of religion. The history of Protestant- 
ism has been the history of the gradual sepa- 
ration of private piety from church domi- 
nation. It has been the history of the putting 
apart of those two familiar ideas : the love of 
God, and the control of church. How firmly 
fixed in the European mind was the notion 
that there must exist somewhere a church 
control may be seen in the bigotry of Luther, 
of Calvin, — of all early Protestantisms. So 
deeply were the roots of the Roman Empire 
entwined in the mental habit of Europe. 

We have seen that the Roman Church which 
was once the government of the whole of 
Europe, was gradually shuffled off through the 
rise of new national feelings, and of new 
kinds of piety and learning until the Organi- 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

zation which had ruled all things was left as 
merely a great secret society with its inherited 
dogmas and practices, and its Great Claim. 
That Claim was and is to tie up again those 
two ideas which every force in society ap- 
pears to be driving asunder, to confuse ideas 
which are daily and yearly becoming more in- 
con fusible and distinct. In the early days of 
the church, while her enemies were external, 
she needed but a simple philosophy. But 
as her internal troubles grew fiercer, and as 
quasi-civil war within her own boundaries 
grew hot, her thinkers were put to newer the- 
ories. She was obliged to use her wits more 
and more in keeping up her prestige. And 
thus it came about that a worser morality 
was developed during the Reformation than 
had ever arisen before in the church, or 
perhaps in the history of the world. A simi- 
lar thing happened, and for similar reasons, 
during the struggle of the Slave Power in 
America between 1830 and i860. During the 
years when our Slave Power found it neces- 
sary to shorten its hand in order to sustain 
its ascendancy, ethical theory was stretched 
so as to cover practices that were more and 
more revolting to right feeling and common 
instinct. Similarly during the Reformation, 
when the Church believed her very life to 
28 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

be at stake, her practices became less scrupu- 
lous and more severe; and to cover some of 
these developments a philosophy was required. 
This leads me to speak of the rise of the 
Jesuit Order. 

The Roman CathoKc Church was shaken to 
its foundation by the revolt of northern Ger- 
many. Luther had defied her and she had not 
been able to punish him. One would think 
that such an outcome would have led to re- 
forms within the church and the triumph of 
liberal ideas. But, as a matter of fact, it led 
to a reaction and to a counter-reformation 
within the church, which put the extreme con- 
servatives in power. In religious struggles 
all violence, harsh words, wars, persecutions, 
etc., tend to put the extremists in power in 
both camps. The Roman Church, through the 
triumph of Luther's cause, had the benefit, 
as it were, of being persecuted. It became 
fiercer than ever. And there arose a man of 
genius who personified this new fierceness. 
Ignatius Loyola was a man of genius in that 
he builded better than he knew. His func- 
tion was to re-embody the authoritative idea, 
to reduce to human algebra that part of the 
church's dealing with humanity through which 
she caused men to obey. We have seen that 
the idea of authority was always in the Ro- 
29 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

man system. Authority was the second idea, 
always at struggle with the first idea, always 
interfering between the soul and the soul's 
consciousness of God. Loyola perceived that 
Authority rested partly on idea, but more 
largely on training. 

He therefore established a society upon 
the single thought. Obedience ; and he trained 
his neophytes until they became mere creatures 
of the order, — they must become like dead 
bodies in the hands of the General. To kill 
the individual soul was the aim of Loyola, to 
create men who had nothing, did nothing, 
thought nothing, desired nothing, knew noth- 
ing a^ individuals, was the Jesuit aim; and it 
was accomplished. Loyola perceived freshly 
what had always been the essence of the 
Church Dominant, and he produced a stronger 
solution of this thing than was in the old sys- 
tem. If the old was gunpowder, the new was 
dynamite. 

While Loyola's invention is undoubtedly the 
most evil thought in history, and while the 
Society of Jesus is probably the tightest knot 
of reactionary influence upon the globe, we 
must not credit Loyola with an understand- 
ing of these results. The Protestant mind 
attributes insincerity to persons whose very 
essence was sincerity, whose very soul and 
30 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

being were absorbed into their work. Loyola 
was one of these men. Let us, if we can, 
perceive that there is only one error in the 
whole headlong, sacrificial self-oblation of 
Loyola and of his followers, namely, that the 
oblation and prostration are not done quite 
absolutely to God himself. There is an in- 
tervention: there is a third party. Some- 
one is taking charge of these souls besides 
God. 

Loyola seems to have intended to prop up 
the Papacy ; and the special vows of obedience 
which the Jesuit makes to the Pope, seem in- 
tended to supply the Pope with a sort of inner 
body-guard, to counteract, as it were, the 
democracy of the College of Cardinals. At 
any rate, through Loyola's Order, the reaction- 
aries were knitted together into a secret So- 
ciety, or cabal. The kernel of mediaeval 
thought and practice has thus been preserved 
down to our own day in the Institutes of St. 
Ignatius. Loyola created an imperium in 
imperio, a body whose members place the in- 
terests of their own order above the interests 
of their faith. The Society was very soon 
used as a means of controlling the Papacy. 
The Order has, at times, been dissolved by 
the Papacy, and, at times (as at present), 
has worked in concert with the Papacy. But 

31 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

the Jesuit Order, as an influence, is always 
separable from the Roman Catholic Church at 
large. Since Loyola's time, then, the Roman 
Catholic Church has moved forward as a 
unity ; yet, in the minds of its managers there 
is a vertical division which makes a schism 
(invisible to the outer world), between the 
Jesuits and the rest of the hierarchy. The 
heirarchy is thus divided into two groups 
which though they generally work together 
think apart. 

The Jesuits are men who have been at 
school and college together. They have been 
through the severest training ever devised 
for the purpose of subjugating the private 
will, and they have done this in company with 
one another. The comradeship from early 
childhood in an exclusive, secret society, and 
obedience to the same General, make the Jes- 
uits into a clique, almost into a species by 
themselves. In theory all sentiments of race, 
language, and origin should have been sedu- 
lously rubbed away through a regimen of 
changing domicile and perpetual routine, until 
the perfected Jesuit cannot find in the whole 
wide world another man like himself, except 
it be a Jesuit. 

The Jesuits are the principal teaching or- 
der of the Roman church. Thus if you apply 
3« 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

to the Archbishop in New York for some aid 
in church matters, he will, as soon as he un- 
derstands that a question of doctrine is con- 
cerned, ring a bell and ask if Father So-and- 
So is at leisure; saying, that as the matter 
is one of theology, the Jesuits will attend to 
it. You will then be ushered in to the sanc- 
tum of a highly-educated English priest, per- 
haps from Stonyhurst, who will deal with 
you as ably and as readily as the most per- 
fected cash register deals with the confiding 
five cent piece. So, also, at the close of some 
great day in Roman Catholic history, — some 
day when a glorious victory has been won, 
a great step forward has been taken, a news- 
paper founded, or a tablet to the Pope at- 
tached to the exterior of a United States Cus- 
tom House, — if you should enter late at night 
into the Archbishop's Palace on Madison 
Avenue, you would find the Cardinals and 
Princes of the Church sitting up in solemn 
conclave, eager, powerful men. And if you 
should linger on unobserved until the hour of 
parting came, you would see all of these great 
men retire and disperse with holy salutations ; 
going in two bands, and in two diflferent direc- 
tions, the Jesuits in one direction, and the non- 
Jesuits in another, each band to its own lair 
to talk it over. We must return to the Ref- 
33 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

ormation, however, if we would understand 
these doings in Madison Avenue. 

The practical genius of Ignatius Loyola 
knitted the Papacy together by making alle- 
giance easy. We have seen that the Church 
Dominant had from the earliest times made 
use of its power to condone sin as an engine 
of government. Loyola and his followers de- 
veloped this idea into a science, and they did 
so at the very moment when such a philosophy 
was required in order to keep many powerful, 
rich, skeptical, worldly people in the church. 
By dividing the substance of religion from the 
form, Loyola and his followers revealed the 
very essence of all religious malpractice. 
From his time dates that system of dialectic 
by which evil is good and good evil, accord- 
ing to the interests of the church. 

The invention of Loyola greatly accelerated 
the decay of the Roman system; because the 
segregation of all that was most conserva- 
tive in that system into a society whose works 
were very visible, kept the worst abuses of the 
Roman Church always to the fore in Euro- 
pean politics, and brought into sharper and 
ever sharper contrast the cruel workings of 
the church, and the benevolent tendencies of 
modern civilization. The Jesuits have brought 
discredit upon the Catholic church much as 

34 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

Tammany Hall brings discredit upon Democ- 
racy. Each shows the extreme abuse of a 
system. The difference between the two cases 
is that Tammany Hall is more open to outer 
influence than the Society of Jesus is. Tam- 
many Hall improves as fast as the New York 
citizen improves; whereas the Jesuit is an 
artificial product who is continuously being 
produced by a hot-house education, and his 
order is therefore less open to the general 
influences of modern society than any other 
body of civilians in the world. Nevertheless, 
that society is, in a practical sense, affected 
by the modern world which surrounds and 
encloses it (as we have seen by Foggazaro's 
Santo), and we must beware of regarding 
even the Jesuit Order as a thing by itself 
and wholly foreign to ourselves. 

If most Protestants do not know that there 
is such a thing as a good Jesuit, this is due 
to the Jesuit record in history. The desire 
for domination and for money, the vacuity 
of idea, the vulgarity of aim in the Jesuits has 
left them a reputation that does not shine. 
And yet there have always been men among 
them who exhibited the military virtues, cour- 
age, obedience, self-sacrifice in the highest 
degree. These very virtues are the ones which 
lead to the worst vices of the moral and in- 

35 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

tellectual world, namely to the destruction of 
private conscience or of private mind. 

In one sense the Protestant can never meet 
the mind of the Jesuit; because the Jesuit 
is forbidden to hold private opinions. His 
talk must be formal. Yet the Protestant 
ought to use every effort to see the good in 
these men, a goodness which beams out of 
some of them in spite of our analysis, which 
condemns their system of education and con- 
demns the history of their order. The Cath- 
olic is precluded by dogma from conceding 
true holiness to Protestants. But the Protes- 
tant has no excuse for looking with a jaun- 
diced eye upon the saints in the Roman Cath- 
olic Church. 

One more general remark about the Roman 
Church and I will speak about America. The 
Hierarchy must be thought of as a vast mov- 
ing caravanserai, with a wonderful outfit of 
instruments and paraphernalia for attracting 
and ruling the peoples of the earth. It is a 
complex, roaming, wallowing wave of power, 
the residuum of the ancient Roman power, 
and it becomes more and more detached from 
its geographical base, as it rolls across human- 
ity with the momentum of the centuries behind 
it. This coil of human influences picks up men 
and nations in one place and drops men and 

36 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

nations in another place. The Great Need of 
humanity cries to Rome. The hunger of men 
for a union with God cries out to her. On 
the other hand, her old subjects are constantly 
in revolt. They are over-taxed, kept in ig- 
norance and bondage and separated from 
modern progress. Thus Rome is constantly 
losing adherents in her old dominions ; and, as 
she does so, she moves on to new countries 
with her propaganda. 

In the middle of the nineteenth century it 
became evident to minds far less acute than 
those of the great Roman Ecclesiastics that the 
Papacy was losing ground in Europe and must 
turn to America. It must come to the United 
States and grow up with the country. It has 
done so. We have had the Roman Catholic 
question during the last fifty years; but we 
have not had time to attend to it. In Europe, 
where the history of this Religion has been 
enacted, the whole matter is understood by the 
educated classes. The Wars of Religion have 
never been forgotten, and the ever-present 
ultra-mundane question burns openly. In 
Europe people are not afraid to speak of the 
Roman Catholic Church. But America was 
settled by Protestants after the end of the 
Wars of Religion, or by Protestants who es- 
caped the question by coming here. We have 
'^7 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

had no religious question in America and our 
people have forgotten what the question 
means. Besides this we have been engaged in 
making money ; we have been harassed by our 
slavery troubles ; in more recent times we have 
been preoccupied with practical reforms. We 
have not been interested in religion; we have 
forgotten the principles of the matter. The 
extraordinary ignorance of our people in mat- 
ters of history, their belief in destiny, their 
inability to stop and reflect about anything, 
their desire that our politics shall not contain 
any religious question, their sense of security, 
due to the presence of the Atlantic Ocean 
between themselves and Europe — all these 
things have led the Americans of the last fifty 
years to hide their heads in the sand in regard 
to the doings of the Roman Catholic Church. 
Our press is timid and public opinion ap- 
proves. In our politics the question has been 
shunned as far as possible: such is our wis- 
dom. We are afraid of getting angry: we 
would hurt no one's feelings. The instinct 
of the Protestants has, on the whole, been an 
instinct of silence. This has worked in well 
with the aims of Rome; for, be it observed, 
while Rome can work in silence, opposition 
to Rome involves publicity. 

Rome has been the first to take the field in 

38 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

America. Within the last few years a great 
Catholic forward movement has been in 
progress: Rome has proclaimed openly her 
intention of ruling America. For many years 
the chief income of the Papacy has been drawn 
from America : and now it appears, we are to 
become a Roman Catholic country. Rome 
has spoken. 

Her method of speech is the same as it was 
in the Sixteenth Century — a rasping arro- 
gance. It is a curious fact that while the 
Protestant is abjured not to injure the feel- 
ings of the Catholic, the great Roman Eccle- 
siastics, Cardinals, and Archbishops, make it 
a point to speak with calculated contempt of 
all that the Protestant American holds dear — 
his patriotism, his religion, his schools, and his 
domestic life. The Catholic layman does not 
do this — partly because of his kindly feelings, 
partly because he is not in the secret of the 
movement. He is indeed the middle point 
about which the whole movement turns; but 
he is not yet in the whirl of it. 

The man whose allegiance is ultimately at 
stake in this contest, the man about whom 
the battle rages, is the Roman Catholic lay- 
man. The object of the Hierarchy is always 
to secure the support of this man for its ex- 
tremest claims (whatever they may happen to 
39 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

be). The method of securing this support 
was, in modern times, perfected by the Jesuits 
and consists in the assumption of an arrogant, 
overbearing tone and the doing of everything 
within the church's power to irritate Protestant 
feeling. If the Protestants respond to this 
treatment in kind; if they become angry or 
indulge in violent denunciation of the Catholic 
Church, then the Catholic layman naturally 
becomes excited and is thrown into a mood 
in which he is apt to support the extremists 
of his own party. At any time when the 
Jesuits are in control of the Papal See a hec- 
toring, squally policy may be looked for in 
foreign countries. The situations which arise 
as the result of this method, give special 
power to the Jesuit Order ; because that Order 
is military in form and thrives in war times. 
It was through a reaction of this sort that 
Bismarck was goaded into persecuting the 
Jesuits in the seventies. The result was a con- 
solidation of Catholic feeling behind the Jesuit 
Order. The Roman Catholics have held the 
balance of power in the Reichstag ever since. 
The Papacy, then, from time to time, as- 
sumes a militant attitude in Protestant coun- 
tries. Its general tone may be expressed as 
follows : "We intend to rule : we despise you : 
we will speak and act with open contempt of 
40 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

your sacred things. But woe unto you if you 
murmur or lisp a word against our sacred 
religion. Unless you sit silent and accept our 
insolence, pay us our money, destroy your own 
social system and substitute ours, we will raise 
such a revolt, and such an outcry that you'll 
have a religious war on your hands.*' This 
reasoning is largely unconscious; and it is at 
the bottom of the present Catholic movement 
in America. 

The Papacy, for reasons of its own, believes 
that the time has now come for a great up- 
rising ; the Church must show its power. Our 
Press is easily ruled. Catholic business men 
are marshalled behind the advertisement 
columns : the rest follows. You would think, 
to read the American papers, that the whole 
nation was thrilled to the marrow over a lawn- 
party given to Monseigneur Flanagan at Ho- 
boken, or the blessing of a brass farthing 
which Father Tim found in the charity-box 
on his first Sunday in the east hundred-and- 
fourteenth street chapel just fifteen years ago. 
The doings and the pictures of great prelates 
are recorded with unctuous servility in the 
great dailies. Their insolent sermons are 
printed at great length. The social life of 
Roman Catholicism is chronicled. English 
Jesuits adorn the drawing-rooms of Irish mag- 
41 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

nates, and rich American ladies besiege the 
foyers of the Prelates, laying their great posi- 
tion, their sins and their jewels at the feet of 
Rome. It would be easy to write an account 
of this movement that would amuse posterity. 
And yet we ought not to forget that there is 
at the present time a sincere religious move- 
ment going on all over America. It can be 
felt in every church, in every political party, 
in every reform movement. There is a great 
and deep ground-swell of religion in Ameri- 
ca; and this lifts also the Roman Catholic 
Forward Movement into dignity, and gives it 
heart and heat. The goodness and beauty in 
it cannot be denied; nor ought anyone to 
wish to diminish the love of God — just be- 
cause it inhabits Roman Catholic bosoms. 

Our task is harder ; our task is to hold fast 
to the good, yet to understand the evil. We 
need not to grow angry; but we need never 
submit. The problem of America — the prob- 
lem for the leaders of thought in America 
to-day, IS to get this subject opened up, upon 
clear lines, without passion. It is not neces- 
sary for the American to be eaten up by 
Rome, to have his public moneys directed to a 
foreign secret society, and the books in his 
public libraries censored by the Jesuits. It is 
not necessary fpr bim to sit still while his 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

children are taught that patriotism is a sin 
and that the priest shall control in politics. 
It is not necessary for him to admit that his 
wife is a concubine and his children are ille- 
gitimate, because the church of Rome did not 
sanction his marriage. If the American thinks 
that the doctrines I have mentioned will refute 
themselves, or that they will not work in our 
climate, he is mistaken. Those doctrines are 
working very smoothly in our climate to-day. 
Our duty is to break silence at once, and to 
break it with a mace that is heavy and calm. 

We may take it for granted that the Roman 
Church in America will be what it has been in 
the Protestant countries since the Reforma- 
tion, namely: hostile to education, hostile to 
the individual, an enemy to science; the de- 
clared opponent of all goodness save its own. 
The Roman Church cannot be otherwise. In 
its essence, and by its own professions, it must 
be these things. I am not defaming it : I am 
stating what it states. I am repeating its 
utterances. Strange to say, when a Protestant 
makes such statements about the Roman 
Church they are regarded as offensive; but 
when the Pope makes them, they are divinity. 

We may, I think, take for granted that in 
the end, the powers of the modern world will 
control in America, and that the domination 

43 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

of Rome will be rejected. The question is 
how far that Church shall get before it is 
checked, how Catholic this country shall have 
become before the tide turns. I have no desire 
to extinguish the Catholic faith ; but to arouse 
the Catholic layrrian to the situation, and to 
beg the Protestant layman to take heed of it. 
The old mediaeval situation is with us once 
more. It requires clear thought and benevo- 
lence ; because our real enemy is not religion. 
The real enemy is confused thought and bitter 
feeling. Our need is the development of in- 
tellect, the rise of spiritual interests, the awak-. 
ening of new individual power in breasts both 
Catholic and Protestant throughout the land. 
Consider what the average American citizen 
is to-day. He is a man with faint religious 
interests, unused to the handling of his own 
political affairs. (They have been until quite 
lately entrusted to middle-men.) He is apt to 
be a partisan extremely unwilling to stand up 
alone under any circumstances; very fearful 
of making enemies; very content in making 
money ; extraordinarily and uniquely ignorant 
of the history of the Roman Church. The 
Roman Catholic layman in America knows lit- 
tle of the history of his church : no more does 
the Protestant. To induce such a man as I 
have described (whether Protestant or Catho- 
44 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

lie), to think clearly about the relations be- 
tween religion and politics, to inform himself 
accurately, to speak openly, to act deliberately, 
is a hard matter. You wish him to save 
American education: Alas, he has no philo- 
sophic or historic education. You ask him to 
protect the public treasury: He has for long 
years left it in charge of his business manager. 
You beseech him in the name of liberty of 
conscience and of the Right to worship God 
to awaken out of his dream: These appeals 
mean little to a mind that has forgotten that 
there ever was any serious trouble about reli- 
gion in the world, and that cannot see how 
such things are of importance. 

On the other hand consider the seductions 
which active participation in the work of a 
great secret society — ^the forward Catholic 
Movement — must have for just such a mind 
as I have described. The man is asked to 
work in an organization where he will be sup- 
ported and sustained at every moment. He 
works as a partizan — he works for particular 
and comprehensible ends, generally the getting 
of money out of the government and the put- 
ting of his own pals into office. He is helped 
forward in his business. This is the sort of 
work he understands — namely, practical poli- 
tics. He retains his party affiliations. He 
45 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

does not need to know anything, nor to exam- 
ine, think upon, speak upon, or decide any 
matter except according to instructions. As 
for religion, he is provided with it; and as I 
have said above, it is true religion. There 
is true religion in it for the most part. At 
least I believe so. 

It IS a gloomy view of the matter which 
I have sketched in the last paragraph. If this 
were the whole truth the world would go 
straight to perdition. If the forces of good 
and evil were in reality so arranged as we 
think we perceive them to be, the evil would 
always win. But there is always error in 
our analysis, and the error is always of the 
same sort. The error consists in our not al- 
lowing enough for the invisible power of 
Goodness. The real battle is never a battle 
between different kinds of people, as, for in- 
stance, between Catholics aitd Protestants, or 
between good Protestants and bad Protestants, 
good Jesuits and bad Jesuits. The battle is 
within the heart of each man. The enduring 
factors of life are deep and trembling things, 
which dogma cannot petrify nor authority con- 
trol. 

Let us regard our American troubles from 
the standpoint of universal history. Did not 
the education of modern Europe come about 

46 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

through this same controversy; and was not 
the Reformation conducted by Catholic lay- 
men ? Every man in this land who is pursuing 
truth with unselfish devotion is combatting the 
temporal power of the Roman Catholic Hier- 
archy — every scientist, every philanthropist, 
every politician, every writer, every teacher, 
every priest. You who look on the whole 
movement from without, do you not know that 
the real breach, the real remedy, must come 
from within? Look upon no man as your 
enemy. Do not regard the Roman Catholic 
mind as your enemy. In reality you arc a 
part of that mind. Resist not evil. Let the 
energy by which your own vision reaches the 
next man go forward with the power of a 
natural process. He is you. He is reachable 
with your idea. Though he were the Pope 
himself, your thought may reach him. Nay, it 
does. 

If you study the last four centuries you will 
find that the real Reformation came neither 
from the Protestants nor from the Catholics, 
but from something which was about equally 
inherent in each of them, something which, in 
spite of their antagonisms, somehow edged 
Itself into the world. It is this something 
which has changed the world. One man will 
say that this element is the influence of Christ, 
^7 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

another that it is due to an escape from the 
influence of Christ, still another that it comes 
through learning, or through industrial prog- 
ress. We cannot be sure as to any of these 
conclusions. We can only see that the whole 
outcome has arrived as the operation of God, 
and has always gone forward apparently 
against the will of everybody. 

It is then not without relief that I find this 
Roman question lying across our path in 
America. The historic continuity of mankind 
meets us here, and steers us back to ideas 
which have been foreign to us only because all 
ideas have been foreign to us. Behold, we are 
re-awakening to spiritual and religious truth; 
and we find ourselves facing the very matters 
which occupied us before we fell asleep. 



48 



II 



THE EFFECT OF HEBRAIC THOUGHT 
ON WESTERN EUROPE 

Consider the mixture of good and evil in 
the world, and how we can never quite get 
an unmixed sample of either. It is the same 
with truth and falsehood. Our statements al- 
ways contain a little of each. I say this here 
because I would not have the folly of my 
words caught at — as if I thought to scoop up 
truth, and make a present of it to the reader. 
Truth is something which glows and beckons, 
and, at times, approaches and descends upon 
us — encloses and possesses us; but it remains 
a mystery. Those profound sayings which 
appear to be absolute strands of living truth 
always profess themselves to be mere symbols. 
It was the Jew who discovered God; and 
Christ, who re-delivered God to us, was a Jew. 
A Jew, yet much more than a Jew. The 
j^/ ancient Hebrew race knew religion, and laid 

the foundations for morality, as the Greeks 
did for the fine arts. No one has added a 

49 



/ 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

line to the Bible, whether to the Old or to the 
New Testament. Whence comes this natural 
ascendancy in spiritual matters, this insight, 
which the ancient Jew possessed? Perhaps 
it comes from racial, ancestral, age-long pre- 
occupation. The Semitic wise men had been 
handling these themes for thousands of years. 
Certainly the book of Job exhibits a school 
of practical ethics that runs straight up into 
celestial speculation — showing a gamut of 
thought and a vigor of expression that have 
never since been reached — except by the Jew. 
The God of the Jews w^as at first a racial 
God; but the mind of the Jew w^as stronger 
than his patriotism, and by degrees the racial 
idea of piety was supplanted by a universal 
idea. All through the Old Testament we find 
the thought of Jehovah cracking the old Mo- 
saic Dispensation. You can see the seams 
in it here and there, from Genesis onw^ard. 
A Universe has been discerned through the 
rifts, and wane has broken the cask. Also, in 
the New Testament, Christ's power shatters 
the whole structure of the Mosaic Dispensa- 
tion till you can hardly find the frame work ; 
and yet the adumbration of a Christ has been 
at the back of that Jewish Theology. The 
New Testament, without the Old, can be but 
half-comprehended. The very figures of 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

speech are the same in each, and half of 
Christ's thought is to be found in Moses. 

Let us now turn, almost at random, to the 
sayings of the Jews, and examine a few of 
the metaphors of this old Wisdom, in order 
to illustrate the intellectual heights at which 
these Semitic thinkers habitually walked. 
"The battle is not to the strong, neither is 
the race to the swift. The stone which the 
builders rejected has become the head of the 
corner. ... As thou knowest not what is 
the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do 
grow in the womb of her that is with child: 
even so thou knowest not the works of God 
who maketh all." 

With all this profundity, with all this human 
feeling, there is never a note of falsetto in 
Jewish sentiment. The poetry of the Psalms 
and of the Prophets touches many kinds of 
religious feeling — joyous, sad, mystic, impas- 
sioned, elegaic; yet it is always robust. The 
straining after religious emotion which char- 
acterizes Christianity in Western Europe was 
not seen in Isaiah. If you contrast any page 
of mediaeval piety with a page of the Psalms, 
or contrast any legend or anecdote out of 
the Middle Ages with one from the New 
Testament, you will find that the desire to 
experience religion is what characterizes Eu- 
51 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

ropean Christianity. This straining after emo- 
tion began in the earUest Christian era. You 
might say that this note of hysteric f eeUng is 
one of the immediate effects which Jewish 
thought produced upon the Gentile nature. 
Jewish thought was like a strong brew that 
upset the stomach of less hardy men. How 
could the Roman colonist Augustine, living 
under the African sun, digest the fiery doc- 
trine of Israel and yet retain the phlegm of 
Israel? The metaphysics of the Hebrew put 
Europe to its purgation; and, down to quite 
recent times — yes, down almost to yesterday — 
the Western brain has been turned by this 
Eastern drug: the drug drives us mad. The 
point at which this general tendency towards 
emotionalism climaxed was the Roman Mass. 
Catholics say that no Protestant can have any 
understanding of the mystical experience 
which is theirs at every celebration of the 
Mass. The Mass, they say, is the Secret of 
the Church's life, and this living foundation 
of power is what vitalizes the church and 
keeps it in motion. There is much truth in 
this claim. The good Catholic can find the 
centre and focus of his emotional nature at a 
moment's notice. He has a short cut to reli- 
gious experience. He has but to go to church 
and instantly he gets rid of his mind and walks 
52 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

into his feelings. He leaves his intellectual 
part at the church door; and if there is any- 
thing left of his intellect as he walks up the 
aisle, he lays it on the altar. The problems of 
his growing mind are dismissed — for does he 
not hold truth already? By a single act of 
submission he gains the consolations of reli- 
gion, which are, I believe, all the more poig- 
nant because they are focalized, localized, 
dramatized and superinduced by a ritual. 

Let each one of us remember the moments 
of religious exaltation that come to us — some- 
times years apart. Let us recall the thought 
that rose in our minds at such times, "If I 
could but find my way back to this place I 
should be a religious person." And the Catho- 
lic conceives that he has found the way back. 
No wonder, then, that he adores his ritual. 
What he does not understand is that some part 
of his emotion is due to a paralysis of por- 
tions of his nature. One place in which this 
paralysis shows is in his conversation. His 
talk is controlled. He himself does not know 
how much he may utter without a breach of 
discipline. In this regard Catholicism is very 
unlike the old Hebrew dispensation which 
gave men tongues. 

The truth seems to be that man ought not 
to expect frequent or continuous experiences 
53 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

of emotional religion. If they come like the 
thief in the night it is well ; but human nature 
is so made that the true revelations cannot 
be counted upon nor controlled, and that the 
simulacra or counterfeits of them are always 
bought at a sacrifice. This was what the old 
Hebrews knew, and what western Europe has 
never known but is beginning to find out. 
That madness and passion, that search for 
sensation and sensationalism, for rapture and 
for felt-piety — that use of Judah as a drug — 
is what for a time enslaved western Europe. 
TTie temporal power of the papacy rested 
upon it. 

We have seen how easily the political- 
minded Romans made use of the new religion 
in ruling their Empire. Do not blame them. 
They could no nothing else, under their sys- 
tem. In fact, they themselves became the 
creatures of the new system. The temptation 
to monopolize the new source of feeling was 
not recognized as a temptation at all. It 
resulted from a sincere illusion on all hands — 
the illusion, namely, that the interests of the 
Empire were identical with those of truth. 
That illusion persists to-day ; and every Prot- 
estant ought to remember this fact in dealing 
with the Catholic question. In the early days 
the German tribes were converted wholesale; 
54 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

the world was dealt with roundly. There was 
to be no other power except Rome, whether 
spiritual or temporal ''Subdued" is the word : 
Rome subdued the world. 

There is a pathological element in Roman 
Catholic piety. The good Catholic knows re- 
ligion ; but in the learning of it a nerve in his 
stomach has been depressed, the Church must 
hold his hand or he sinks. His consolation 
will be taken from him, his throbbing sense of 
God's presence will leave him, he is a lost 
soul if he separates himself from the Church. 
Therefore he clings and hangs, therefore he 
submits and recants. The truth is that he has 
been enjoying a more acute sense of his near- 
ness of God than he could have experienced 
without the use of a drug. Sensationalism, 
while seeming to increase his faith, has really 
undermined it. I am using strong language 
in order to bring out a difficult idea. Let 
the reader make allowances. A man's faith 
is enfeebled when he requires to be feeling, 
to be feeling his nearness of God. 

The ear-mark of mediaeval devotion is a 
preoccupation with the state of one's soul — a 
sort of medical interest in one's soul. The 
Jews were either not subject to the evapora- 
tion of faith — the occasional coldness, flatness 
and loss of the sense of religion, from which 
55 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

the mediaeval Christian suffered — or else the 
Jews had philosophy enough to wait quietly 
till faith returned, and artistic sensibility 
enough to refrain from writing about them- 
selves in the meanwhile. Even their peniten- 
tial Psalms are unself conscious. The eye of 
the sinner is on God, rather than on himself. 
The mediaeval Christian, however, is a vale- 
tudinarian. 

The mediaeval sentiment in regard to pain 
and suffering, to repentance and purgation is 
tinctured with excess. The desire to ex- 
perience emotion leads in his case to some- 
thing very like a disease, to which I can find 
no analogy in Israel nor in Christ. We know 
that suffering is generally involved in moral 
advance, that God is often the celestial sur-^ 
geon, as Stevenson says. This is one of the 
great facts of life. But for us to clutch the 
knife and hug pain is an idea which I cannot 
find in the New Testament nor in the Old. It 
comes out of Darkest Christendom. Philo- 
sophic historians tell us that this tendency of 
the mediaeval temperament to embrace pain 
reflects the misery and degradation of the ages 
just after Constantine, during which civiliza- 
tion was being lost and despair was every- 
where dominant. But I rather think that this 
emotional view of religion was adopted as a 
S6 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

short cut to sanctity. We see evidences of it 
in the very earliest days of Christianity. 

A striving towards salvation seems to have 
come into the world as the immediate conse- 
quence of Christ's teaching. There is an un- 
pleasant flavor in this notion that men are to 
get something for themselves out of truth — 
even salvation. And yet this idea seized and 
occupied the world from St. Paul to Pascal. 
Schemes of salvation, theories of soul-saving 
fill the books. These Christians appear to be 
after something, like carp about bread crumbs. 

It is a common experience in settlement 
work, (as it is in family life) to find selfish- 
ness in the children often springing up as the 
result of pure unselfish care for them on the 
part of parents and guardians. The young 
ones get a notion of their own importance and 
they play the game. I am reminded of this 
when I remember the divine solicitude of 
Christ over the welfare of men's souls, and 
then watch the spirit in which Christ's follow- 
ers soon took up the work of saving their own. 

This desire to secure salvation, this desire 
to experience religion led men to submit to 
regimens that should bring on the reaction 
and, of course, the means of superinducing 
it became a part of ritual. As time went on 
this means worked in well with the confes- 
57 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

sional, the rack, the Inquisition and the other 
devices for bringing men into conformity 
through appeals to sensation and sensational- 
ism. The priesthood adopted theories of sal- 
vation and summas of philosophy: it wove 
nets to catch men. Christ became obscured 
in a labyrinth of rules and practices as to how 
to get at him, and dogmas as to what he is. 
There were, as we have seen, really two mo- 
tive powers at work in the loom that wove this 
fabric: — first, individual piety in the western 
mind, seeking a thread to lead it towards the 
light; and second, Church organization hold- 
ing these threads. 

All of these debasements of Christ's teach- 
ing — the emotionalism, the search for salva- 
tion, the invention of shibboleths — were parts 
of the instrumentation through which the 
lower, less complex, and more sensuous intelli- 
gence of Europe made Jewish thought compre- 
hensible to itself. The Roman Church, 
through the fact that it was a government, thus 
became the agent during a great many hun- 
dred years in oversensitizing its people in a 
particular manner, and in superinducing cer- 
tain specific religious experiences. In course 
of time those evils resulted, whose gross ex- 
terior form became known to all the world 
through the Reformation. A tremendous re- 

58 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

vulsion followed the exposure of abuses, and 
the Church lost ground. 

In reviewing the whole matter we can see 
that the mediaeval belief that pain is something 
meritorious, and that it can be manipulated in 
such a way as to bring on salvation is not in 
Christ's teaching. It is plain that any recipe 
which ensures piety — like any recipe which 
makes art easy — weakens piety— or art. The 
absence of any such recipe from the Gospels 
is the most striking thing in them. The Lord's 
Prayer is the only formular of devotion which 
one can find in the New Testament ; and this 
prayer is not insisted upon. It seems to have 
been given by Christ to his followers in a re- 
sponse to a demand, and was probably Christ's 
own personal prayer. With regard to pain, 
all theories which regard pain as the parent of 
piety imply a knowledge of our own needs 
which we do not possess. We do not know 
whether we stand in need of pain or not. Let 
us hope we do not need it ; but let us accept it 
if it comes. 



59 



Ill 

THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF 
RELIGION 

Everybody is afraid that Religion will be 
lost. This is the reason always given for 
every unpleasant thing done in the name of 
God. The Protestants and Catholics alike 
fought out their wars of religion with the 
same end in view. They were and are exactly 
alike in their determination to save religion 
and hold up the hands of God. Let us con- 
sider the Reformation. 

In historic retrospects we must occasionally 
take in at one sweeping glance a very long 
period of time, and review the life of the race 
as if it were the life of one man. Humanity 
is, indeed, like a mammoth man who requires 
a thousand years to go through spiritual 
changes which perhaps in the individual might 
take place in a decade. We have seen that 
from the very beginning there was a sickly 
note in European Christianity, a note of self- 
commiserating emotionalism hardly to be 
60 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

found in Judea or in the classic world. After 
a thousand years of this a reaction set in. 
The inhabitants of Western Europe, having 
tasted of the terrible truths of Hebrew thought 
and having been made very ill by them, began, 
during the Reformation, to cast off the church 
and to re-examine the Bible. It looked as if 
the whole of the Hebrew dispensation were to 
be thrown overboard and as if the world 
would return to the chaos of Paganism. 
Everyone agreed in fearing such an outcome. 
The early reformers desired to retain Juda- 
ism as an instrument of government; but to 
use this in their own way. 

As time went on, however, it became ap- 
parent that there was no getting rid of He- 
brew influence; you might discard the dis- 
pensation as government, but it remained as 
philosophy, as ethics, as poetry, as municipal 
law. It existed as folk lore and proverb; 
domestic life was drenched in it. The illu- 
mination was in the world. Abuses might 
obscure it, the Reformation might obscure it; 
but there was some indestructible truth behind 
all which kept boring its way to the light. 



6i 



IV 

MEMORIES AND HALF-THOUGHTS 

It is easy to write about the past, especially 
about remote history and other people's ex- 
perience. But to speak of contemporary mat- 
ters and of one's own relation to religion is 
hard. All aids and props are withdrawn at 
once and we stand in mid-air. The fact is 
that no man knows much about universal 
truth. There is a certain self-delusion in all 
coherent writing, especially about religion. It 
is the saying of a little more than a man knows 
that makes Theology: all those great tomes 
come out of it. And yet we feel sure that 
every fragment of religious experience is 
somehow part of a whole, and that religion 
is a unity. The upshot is that although the 
fragments are undoubtedly parts of a whole, 
it is not for us to fit them together. This is 
the very thing that they must do for them- 
selves. 

Therefore I leave these little scraps of es- 
says detached and helpless. If they lack the 
62 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

wit and vitality to order themselves into a sys- 
tem I could never help them by any lumbering 
endeavour at philosophic coherence. 



DO NOT GO IN SEARCH OF RELIGION 

The Illumination is in the world. We 
receive it with the prejudices of our educa- 
tion and our geography, with the millionfold 
half-lights of philosophy and sentiment play- 
ing about it, with the atmospheres of nineteen 
centuries shrouding it and the intimate feel- 
ings of our own personal history hallowing it. 
Is it likely then that any man's account of 
such a matter will be final? God forbid. Yet 
I will speak of things which strike me now as 
true. 

During the last one thousand years we have 
learned one thing — that no matter how ar- 
dently a man may wish for a conscious unity 
with God he must never seek it except directly 
from God. Man is not to be trusted. We 
ourselves are not to be trusted. Who knows 
whether this experience, religion, be meant 
for us? It seems as if they who wait in the 
ante-chamber in this spirit are already in 

63 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

the Temple. The power of prayer, the mean- 
ing of contemplation, the knowledge of spirit- 
ual things — as of strength, intuition, com- 
munion, healing — all these things form an 
ever-advancing indoctrination into the nature 
of the universe; and this growing wisdom is 
in its very essence and from the beginning 
something done to us, and which we must 
not seek to accelerate. If we will but allow 
God to do the work without setting up a 
machine of our own, it will be done whole- 
somely and we ourselves shall become robust. 
We should not endeavor to bring on reli- 
gion in ourselves or in others. The temptation 
to push forward in some direction, or to push 
other people forward towards some door, is 
a snare of self-will. Through this zeal we 
push our children down oubliettes. All our 
intervention between them and God is poison 
and brings on hysteria. The thing we truly 
desire must operate in a region beyond all 
personal will, like the attraction of the moon. 
Cast a glance at the moon and bid her reveal 
God to your child; commit the babe to the 
influence of Apollo, with awe in your heart 
and you will leave the child's soul more open 
to the visitation of Christ than if you teach 
him the New Testament in a proselitizing 
spirit. 

64 



NOTES ON RELIGION 
II 

TEACHING A CHILD 

When your child is young, say your pray- 
ers with him and teach him all you know — 
for this is the truest church of Christ and 
the best Apostolic Succession. But even then 
remember that this is but yourself that you 
teach. It is neither Christ himself nor the 
child himself. You must leave them together. 
Consider that Christ was powerless to guide 
or protect his own doctrines. They were 
seized by the winds of heaven, and have, at 
times, been used to make men into devils. 
Even so are you powerless concerning your 
children's fate. Christ's doctrines have not 
made shipwreck nor been lost; neither will it 
be so with the soul of your boy. 

The complexity of life transcends our un- 
derstanding. Even Christ seems to have 
looked for a simpler solution — a second com- 
ing and wind-up of some sort. But the world 
goes on, and perhaps we ought not to complain 
that Christ was wrong in this point ; for where 
should we have been if the Cosmos had come 
to a wind-up during the first century A. D. ? 
But the truth is that there are in the New 

65 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

Testament as well as in the Old bits of Semitic 
Cosmogony that are not for us. And in like 
manner there will be among the profoundest 
beliefs of any one of us, bits of personal Cos- 
mogony that are true for us but not for our 
children. 



Ill 



INSTITUTIONS 

I WILL not found an institution nor will I 
pull one down. Institutions will be founded 
by men who cannot understand this doctrine; 
and there will be many of them. As I see 
the need of the world to-day it is a need of 
depth of piety and of quietude. The people 
are becoming like paper dolls. They need life 
of such kind as can only pour into people's 
hearts through rest and prayer. Shall I there- 
fore found a monastery where fifty monks 
shall forever pray day and night for the health 
of mankind? No. I am powerless here, too. 
The health must be given by the greater mira- 
cle and according to its own law. I can add 
nothing by my contrivance of a monastery. 
It is a shallow conceit. The monastery exists 
already and I have my cell in it : I will pray 
in my cell. 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

Is not all this matter a matter of symbols ? 
Let every man use what symbols his own 
education requires and change them as his 
education advances; and let him accord to 
other people a like liberty. The patriarch's 
need was served by a pile of stones. When 
Abraham worshipped he required but a rude 
altar. Out of it there grew the middle ages. 
You and I are just emerging from those mid- 
dle ages and find our minds filled with its 
practices. Certain saints and certain skeptics 
agree upon this idea, and when saint and 
skeptic agree \t is supposed they must be 
right. Yet here .both may be wrong. The 
saint finds symbols close to his heart; the 
skeptic sees them close to the saint's heart. 
Neither saint nor skeptic can put a scalpel be- 
tween the symbol and Faith; and yet this is 
what Time does so easily. 

Symbols are the outcome, not the cause, of 
religion. They live as long as faith lives: 
they die as faith dies. To perpetuate them 
for theoretic reasons is wrong. Let love per- 
petuate them; and they will last as long as 
they ought to last. I believe that if we could 
see the invisible church as it actually exists 
in the interlacing of all men in God and with 
each other through the force that makes them 
live, the alarm of those who are fostering 
67 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

religion for fear it will die out would appear 
ridiculous. 

IV 

MANY MANSIONS 

We all live in many houses which exist, one 
inside of the other, and unite us with different 
worlds. There is the House of Art, the House 
of History, the House of Philanthropy, the 
House of Philosophy. There is the House of 
our Social Caste, the House of Business, the 
House of Pleasure, the House of Grief. And 
outside of all there is the Mansion of Reli- 
gion. This mansion, to those who perceive it, 
encloses all the rest. 

The New Testament lies before us at first 
as a cryptogram. But as we read it and grow 
into it, it begins to make the walls and roof 
of our inner house transparent, so that we 
perceive the outer structure. It enters like a 
thief and substitutes here and there windows 
for wall space. It deals with no two natures 
alike; and its operations are as much beyond 
our ken and understanding as the nature of 
the stars. It speaks only in paradoxes; yet 
they seem to come from the truth at the basis 
of all things, and to feed the core of us. 
68 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

The miraculousness which we sometimes 
find in art is here and there only seen in 
metaphysics; for the cryptogram passes over 
and fixes itself in the heavens and in the heart. 
It is become a part of the universe. It is 
everywhere. 



THE WORDS OF CHRIST 

A talisman is something which seems to 
be a word. The memory apprehends it, the 
lips utter it. Yet in reality it is a silent thun- 
derbolt, and leaves behind its passage a gash 
in the cliff. So the story of Christ and the 
words of Christ are accepted by children as if 
they were comprehensible. We lisp them as 
infants. Yet behind them flock ever new 
meanings. They hold a door open and show 
us hosts and distances, and powers and mira- 
cles, and finally the Might of the Universe. 
And yet before us lies merely the little book. 

You cannot hold this fire at arm's length; 
for it runs up your arm and takes possession 
of the brain. You are become incandescent. 
The doctrines of Christ perpetuate the old 
Jewish idea that God was one continuous 
power — ^being all the life in the universe. So 

69 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

that all men became as one, transmitting and 
reflecting that power and becoming themselves 
perfected by submission and damaged by any 
form of opposition to the force. Christ takes 
up this idea, and illustrates it in domestic and 
social life; in the life of personal religion. 
Man can by self-will do nothing except injure 
both himself and others. If he will abandon 
his will to God the miraculous nature of life 
will assert itself and make him wholesome. 
Disease and sin are viewed as one thing. 



VI 

MODERN SCIENCE AND CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 

Modern Science has by devious routes ar- 
rived at the idea that space is filled with infi- 
nite power. And Christian Science must be 
given the credit for proclaiming the same 
thought. Contemporary medicine is on the 
verge of seeing that health is relaxation, and 
all danger whether to mind or body is due to 
nervous tension. Any purpose or intention of 
mind is a variety of quasi-contradiction. The 
injurious and untrue part of Christian Science 
consists in its militancy, its purpose. It 
teaches self -advancement, and thus becomes a 
70 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

mockery and an introversion of religion. To 
say to oneself "It is the will of God that I 
shall recover from my sickness," or "It is the 
will of God that I shall prosper in business/' 
is contradiction in terms. No one can be an 
orthodox Christian Scientist unless his mind 
is a little muddled. He beheves that a thing 
can be and yet not be. It is God's will and 
yet perhaps it isn't. Christian Science thus 
splits on the same rock that the Roman Church 
does, namely, the temptation to make use of 
Christ as an applied force, i. e., to build up 
a church through the bold statement of a 
paradox. But Christ's power comes behind 
and pulls down Christian Science with the 
same ease with which it has pulled down 
greater things. Nevertheless, and in spite of 
its crudities, I am grateful to Christian Sci- 
ence. In its historic aspect it was the portal 
to a new view of old truth. The whole of 
modern life is in debt to it; just as in an 
infinitely deeper sense the whole of modern 
life is in historic debt to the church of Rome. 
Through all the churches, and through all 
humanity outside the churches there has re- 
cently coursed a new sense of the nearness of 
God. We have become natural men once 
more. The powers and mysteries which over- 
cloud Humanity have been restored to us. 
71 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

We are re-united with the past, not merely 
with the last eighteen centuries of Christianity 
or the last four thousand years of Jewish in- 
fluence, but with the great past, which every- 
where gleams with the miraculous, and which 
through this gleam is sanctified and made 
human. When I think of the Agnostics of 
1850, and of the kiln-dried philosophic epoch 
of my own youth, I feel like one who has 
escaped with his soul alive from the burning 
ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah. 



VII 
THE MESSAGE OF CHRISTIANITY 

The world has survived many kinds of 
Christianity. Why is it that we cannot sur- 
vive Christ himself, and come to the bottom 
of his influence? Why is it, that having 
created the Middle Ages through one kind of 
partial comprehension which endured for one 
thousand years, he is now creating a new 
civilization through the new kinds of partial 
comprehension which will certainly qualify the 
next thousand years? The reason is that the 
birth of truth which came through Christ is 
fuller than our own account of it. His life 
72 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

gives truth accurately, our statements weakly 
and inaccurately. Any philosophic abstrac- 
tions written down give, as it were, a chemical 
statement of things as they do not exist. 
Christ in the New Testament by his character, 
conduct and words gives the bread and meat 
in which chemistry is lost in reality. Bread 
will endure till the end of the world. 

Whatever it was that Christ signified, the 
idea required for its deliverance the totality 
of Christ himself. It is more than a philoso- 
phy. It will not remain written on a slate. 
It cannot be read in a book. It is gradually 
delivering itself in the course of the centuries 
through the bodies and souls of men. 

VIII 
THE MYSTICAL BODY OF CHRIST 

Was the very nature of life in the universe 
changed through Christ's existence, or by his 
life? We do not know enough about the 
nature of life to say: but it is quite probable. 
All that we know about God is his continuity, 
backward and forward, up and down and 
across. The element of time being illusory, 
like the emptiness of space, it is very likely 
that the nature of Being is qualified by every 
73 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

event, and of life by every life. How can it 
be otherwise? 

There are many people who, like Phillips 
Brooks, not to speak of all the Catholic saints, 
actually feel Christ in their bosoms. It has 
of recent years, I mean during the last few 
decades of skepticism, become a mental habit 
for people to classify such experiences as 
illusory. But the reality of continuous power 
cannot be called an illusion. The most unlike 
and most invisible things go hand in hand in 
human history ; and some kind of mysticism is 
always a motive power in human affairs. The 
saint seems to be an absurd person to those 
who are not in the secret ; yet the saint always 
has enormous practical influence. Why should 
any sensible man turn his attention even for 
a moment upon Francis of Assisi ? Yet Fran- 
cis IS today commonly regarded as the Father 
of the Rennaissance. The truth is that after 
the fact the scientist accepts with complacency 
the most outrageous violations of his theory. 
He says it was long ago; men were different 
then, etc. The miraculous nature of ordinary 
life is a thing not perceived by these people in 
regard to their own times. They perceive it 
in the past and explain it by reference to 
the unknown. 

I remember thinking Phillips Brooks an ab- 
74 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

surd figure with his Christ in his bosom, a 
deceived person who went about exhorting the 
world and deceiving others. And now I see 
him as a man through whose bosom passed 
the axis of an indestructible force, which 
joined him with all men. This is the true 
church of Christ. It was Christ that revealed 
this structure which passes between man and 
man, and it is his influence that keeps reveal- 
ing it freshly. I am not offended if you call 
this river of life- — this immortal core of God- 
head — the mystical body of Christ, so long as 
you leave it there nakedly in the universe 
and do not try to clap a cover on it or claim 
it for your sect. All men are part of it ; nor 
is there any belief, conduct or experience 
through which a man can forfeit his member- 
ship in it. 



IX 



THE SALVATION ARMY. TOLSTOI. NIETZSCHE 

The numerous and good evangelists who 
smite the drunkard with *'J^sus loves thee!'' 
and thereby in a moment relax the cords of 
his heart, are not — what they seem — mere men 
of a phrase. You and I cannot lift their di- 
vining-rod. They are vessels of fire. Through 

75 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

their hand flows a force that scarifies the sin- 
ner's viscera, and brings back his flesh as the 
flesh of a child. 

There have always been men of personal 
gift, who could fix a focus upon the hearts of 
their fellowmen. Christ was not the first to 
do this kind of miracle. But Christ showed 
the norm and principle at the bottom of the 
matter. His influence grinds men's souls into 
lenses. 

Christianity swallowed up all other religions 
in Western Europe and one cannot find a sam- 
ple of a saint except a Christian saint. So 
we are all creatures of Christ. (I am speak- 
ing here historically — as one might say, "every 
European musician today is a creature of 
Bach.") The Anchorites and Evangelists, 
the Abbots and the Popes, yes, even the Abbes 
and Court confessors are more or less distant 
echoes and caricatures of Christ. Think of 
Charlemagne and his legend. What a strange 
image of Christ is there projected! Could 
one by a whole life-time of contemplation 
catch the truth about any one epoch, or under- 
stand a single character in history — in Chris- 
tian history — unless one were familiar with 
Christ and his story? All these men are but 
samples and side-lights upon Christ's influ- 
ence. Consider Bunyan: consider Aquinas: 

76 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

consider General Booth. The historian, unless 
he deceived himself, would fall dead. The his- 
torian is preserved through the superficiality 
of his thought. He writes a chapter on Pascal 
and goes out to lunch. Pascal indeed! — what 
a complexity of intellectual power, of sick- 
ness, beauty, error, heroism. The world is 
full of these incalculable and shooting forms 
of genius that have been released through 
Christ's thought, and circulate often elliptic- 
ally like erring meteors. 

But what I was about to say is this, that the 
crystallization of Christianity into government 
which began in Augustine's time and climaxed 
with Innocent III, had the effect of petrifying 
and sealing up many forms of Christ's influ- 
ence which have since broken loose amid the 
downfall of the old ecclesiastical regime. The 
New Testament influence during the centuries 
since the Reformation has been filling the 
world with new kinds of Christ — a Christ of 
hospitals, of toleration, of benevolence and 
brotherhood, in the extremest case, a Christ 
without theology. I see this man today walk- 
ing about on all sides of us and blessing the 
world. He is as certainly a product of Chris- 
tian influence as was Saint Bernard. 

His power of utterance is weak, because he 
does not recognize the source of his own be- 

77 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

liefs. He uses blunted words and factory- 
planed ideas. His song is prose. What he 
means can only be said in Hebrew; and he 
has forsworn the language. Yet through all 
his ground glass shines Qirist's teaching and 
Christ's feeling. When I see one of these men 
throwing his life into service I say, Hath not 
this man cast in more than they all? 

There are other types of Christ's influence 
which modern times have made possible. 
There is the great fog-minded, Promethean 
Tolstoi, shifting his huge limbs in vain to 
find ease upon his crag. There is Nietzsche, 
who had the nature of a saint, but who could 
not compass the role of Lucifer — Nietzsche, 
who by denying the light tore his mind into 
ribbons. Both of these men are examples of 
the power of Christ, though they betray it in 
the form of mental ravage. 

Hebrew thought is not a thing to be toyed 
with by strong men. If it falls askew upon 
a temperament that is violent, — or encounters 
on the bias a mind incapable of philosophy, 
it may wreck the reason. 

Tolstoi's religious books, with their tre- 
mendous emotion, their lack of training in 
thought — lack of the first element of Hebrew 
thought — are like music written for an or- 
chestra by a barbarian of genius — terrible, 

78 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

contorted, struggling with a power which 
swells his heart to bursting, undisciplined ; yet 
sincere, human and expressive, yes, in spite of 
all violations and shortcomings, expressive of 
Christ, some sort of a Christ who is tearing 
about within him. Tolstoi believes in submis- 
sion to the law if it can be found. He sub- 
mits. He is childish in that he thinks the mat- 
ter is simpler than it can be made; he would 
state things in arithmetic that can only be 
expressed by the higher mathematics — and he 
does not know the higher mathematics: he 
despises calculus. Thus, in accepting the New 
Testament, (which is, indeed, the higher 
mathematics,) he transmutes it into baby talk. 
He is not satisfied unless the gospel can be 
fulfilled by wearing wooden buttons on his 
clothes or going through a clumsy regime of 
some sort. 

Tolstoi is a little like a very early Christian, 
like St. Augustine, for instance, in the heat of 
his feelings and in the circumstance that He- 
brew thought does not calm but excites him. 
Tolstoi had no early philosophic education, and 
his discovery of Christianity came like a vol- 
cano from within him. 

Nietzsche had almost the opposite experi- 
ence. He was a beautiful and holy child, 
unwis'ely pushed in religious matters. He 
79 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

passed from the hothouse of domestic piety 
straight into the hothouse of University so- 
phistication — into theories of culture, into 
wire-drawn and imaginative Neo-Platonism. 
As he had been a prize holy-boy, so he became 
a prize clever-professor, and sworn enemy to 
his early faiths. The heart of him, unfed by 
his new philosophies, and haunted by the 
memory of Christ, begins to overflow with 
feeling and finds no outlet. It seizes the door 
of hate as an issue for love, manages some- 
how to cut its way out into a nightmare of 
spiritual truth expressed in terms of false- 
hood, and goes insane in the process. Of all 
the victims of Hebrew thought Nietzsche is 
the saddest. He, the most sophisticated man 
in Europe, digs up the bugbears of his early 
life and goes mad over denouncing them in 
the interests of truth. He discovers that most 
of the evils in the modern world are traceable 
to Christ, and he attacks them with a holy 
zeal which recalls the wars of Religion. An 
element of fanatical sanctity is in him. There 
can, indeed, be no question that to certain 
natures he brought inspiration; he came to 
them as a spiritual liberator. So complex 
are the forms of force, and the symbols which 
truth hides under. 

. Both of these two ill-educated men, Tolstoi 
80 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

and Nietzsche, are men of moral genius. Both 
of them feel that Christ is at the bottom of 
the whole question. But Tolstoi has grasped 
the Hebrew idea of humility. Tolstoi, with 
all his surging, is a meek spirit. He recog- 
nizes that man is in himself nothing, that our 
life is negative and that there is no power in 
us. Nietzsche, on the other hand, confutes 
this idea. He builds a whole philosophy on 
the denial of it. He imagines a "superman'' 
who shall do and be one knows not what. 
The awful reality of man's helplessnes is to 
him a malignant illusion which must be dis- 
pelled. He dedicates his life to destroy this 
illusion. Here we have the philosophic error 
in Nietzsche's work. In magnifying the noth- 
ing, Man, he is in every thought exposing 
his naked breast to that stream of invisible 
force which, when meekly received, makes 
man strong, and, when opposed, destroys him. 
With rigid muscles Nietzsche holds his fore- 
head to the grindstone, and is annihilated. 
Where Moses fell on his face Nietzsche stands 
up and preaches the Superman. His sincerity 
canonizes him and his sad history is a monu- 
ment of error; for truth is justified in all her 
children. 

Nietzsche's life gives us the introversion of 
sane living. With his egoism, his vanity, and 
8i 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

his drugs he re-enacts the tragedy of Ajax, the 
tragedy of self-assertion. He thus becomes a 
symbol which points to universal truth; for 
there is no crime or error that is not a form 
of self-will. We live in a universe whose 
development we cannot assist, save by accept- 
ing its operations as wiser than we. But in 
so far as our will becomes dissolved in the 
acceptance of the processes of God, great pow- 
ers are momentarily released, and all the 
wheels turn freely. The goal of our desire 
can be accomplished only through our resigna- 
tion of it. 

Discussions on Free Will generally result in 
a deadlock; because the nature of Will itself 
is not considered. Will is not a steady and 
constant quantity; but a fluctuating current 
which changes in the act and process of 
thought. What I willed yesterday I see was 
illusion. As our vision widens our will dimin- 
ishes; if we could see all our will would fall 
to zero. Force is released through our pa- 
tience and we are strong only through weak- 
ness. This is the paradox in our nature. 
There may be minds of such sort that the 
statement of the paradox brings conversion; 
but to most men the discovery comes through 
experiences which are very subtle ; philosophy 
cannot track them. 

82 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

If one should ask why it is that Christ's 
influence so reorganizes people, what it is in 
him that gives life to the Salvation Army, 
arouses Tolstoi, draws Nietzsche on like a 
magnet and inspires the millions of people in 
whom we see Him working, it might be an- 
swered that Christ had less will of his own 
than any other person who ever had. He is 
all dissolved. He gives free passage to the 
power of God. 



THEOLOGY 

The old dogmas of the church — as for in- 
stance, the doctrines of the Trinity, of the 
Atonement, etc., are crude and somewhat ugly 
attempts to state certain mysteries of personal 
experience in such a manner that they can 
be used as badges of organization work and 
as political whips. For this reason we dislike 
them. After we have once had experience of 
the truths to which they refer, however, we 
can no longer regard them as nonsense, or as 
pure hocus pocus. They are attempts to de- 
fine things which Christ expressed by his life 
— i. e., his relation to God, his relation to men, 
his mediation in every sense of the word. 

83 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

We should accept these dogmas as we accept a 
child's drawing of a haystack. We do not 
doubt the existence of the haystack. 



XI 

THE LOVE OF GOD 

The Love of God is the only thing that 
there is enough of in the universe. To those 
in whom all desires have become merged in 
this love, it is the explanation of all sentiment. 
It is all things — consolation, ambition, hap- 
piness, the love of others, the only thing we 
can give to our children, our aim and our ful- 
filment — life itself. 



XII 



MOODS 

Do nothing either to embrace your mood 
or to oppose it. Say to crossness. Prevail if 
thou list. Make no effort ; for all effort shuts 
the door against new life. Life comes neither 
through affirmation nor through negation but 
through waiting. Let God then execute him- 

84 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

self in all the world ; for all our strength is to 
do evil. The key to all Jewish thought is this : 
that you make no endeavor to understand it. 
If there were to be a single text set on the 
outside of the Bible it should be, I waited for 
the Lord. 

XIII 
HORACE 

Horace shows us the Sabine peasant 
woman, the poorest and humblest of living 
mortals, standing with palms uplifted to deity. 
How many of us are so well acquainted with 
the body's language of piety? 



XIV 
APPARENT HIATUS 

There is an implication in the New Testa- 
ment that a man can have faith if he wants it. 
Christ rebukes people for having little faith. 
I do not understand this and it seems contrary 
to the rest of his teaching. I do not see how 
a man can increase his faith any more than 
he can add a cubit to his stature. To bid him 

85 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

do so confuses him and stops his wheels. Bid 
him rather to knock and it shall be opened 
unto him. One should not, I think, reproach 
a man for his want of faith ; but on the con- 
trary one should tell him that the amount he 
possesses is exactly right for him and that 
perhaps it may increase. 



XV 

EAST OR WEST 

The sacred books of the East (I mean the 
Hebrew wTitings) have been, as we have seen, 
poison to the West. And yet a kind of heal- 
ing poison, too ; for the Europe that has been 
casting off the Papacy during the last four 
hundred years is very different from the 
Europe which accepted the Papacy a thou- 
sand years before. Perhaps we are drenched 
enough and the first fit is over. Perhaps we 
are become so strong in our veins and bowels 
that we can understand the Bible, even the 
New Testament without being turned into 
bigots or devils through contact with the su- 
perior wisdom of Asia. The truth seems to 
be that the Hebraic view as to the nature of 
life is being kneaded into humanity gradually 
and in the course of thousands of years. 
86 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

XVI 

THE PORCHES TO THE TEMPLE OF TRUTH 

There are three porches to the Temple of 
Truth, and all of them lead to the same ro- 
tunda; the porch of Love, the porch of Intel- 
lect, and the porch of Character. 

The man of strong feeling understands God. 
He assents without need of kissing the Book : 
he knows more than his teachers. The man 
of Intellect on the other hand has worked 
out some theory. It may seem rigid and sense- 
less to another, but to him it is a bastion of the 
infinite. He will die for it. Lastly comes the 
man of Conscience, the good citizen. This 
man does not live in the regions of emotion: 
neither can he give you a reason of much 
depth. But he knows how to act. Now of 
these three, he that loves becomes the saint, 
he that thinks becomes the prophet, and he 
that acts becomes the hero. 

Love feels the currents of force, intellect 
perceives them, conscience obeys them. All 
three are servants of force and bow down 
before it. They are directed and used by it: 
they are merged and embodied into it. In 
their fainter forms the identity of those three 

87 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

modes of life is not perceived; but in the 
blossoming perfection of each their identity 
becomes doubly plain. You may call them 
temperaments if you will — ^the saint or lover, 
the prophet (or artist) and the hero. 

These three, then, enter by different portals 
into the Temple where pours the unimaginable 
Power, which is to them (as it were) stillness 
and silence. Instead of death, through the 
shock of this power they receive life; and as 
the three children in the fiery furnace walked 
unharmed, being united with the fourth pres- 
ence that moved within the blast, so these 
accordant souls become lost in the power be- 
hind them, which pours immortally through 
them into us and into all humanity, taking up 
all men in itself by reason of the continuity 
of life. Such a thing is man, that when we 
have begun to perceive the divinity of his life 
we have nowhere to leave off; we find that 
there is no part of him which is not inspired 
and we must regard him as a form and por- 
tion of Deity. 

All of us live in the swirl and terrible suc- 
tion of this great whirlpool. Buddha in his 
contemplation and Mozart in his music do no 
more than submit to it. They go round with 
the stream. And their non-resistance draws us 
in behind them. 

88 



NOTES ON RELIGION 



XVII 

SACRIFICE AND BURNT OFFERINGS 

The practice of Christ's teaching is easy; 
for while you are waiting to begin you are 
already under weigh. On the rack, in the 
school-room ; in society, in solitude ; in books, 
in conduct ; waking and sleeping you have but 
to give way to God's power, to give up, to 
accept, to expect nothing, to be satisfied that 
the problem is being solved and the truth 
advanced and behold you become through this 
very self-surrender a part of the solution it- 
self. 

The Lord's Prayer and the Lord's Supper 
are the whole ritual of Christianity. I cannot 
find in the New Testament any other instru- 
ments of piety, any regimen or scheme of 
devotion, any priesthood or altar. Each soul 
is left to adopt its own devotions and prac- 
tices. As for Christ's own practices we are 
obliged to guess them. He enjoins prayer, 
prayer and fasting, watching, he discourages 
vain repetitions; but leaves all in general 
terms. No form of service was set up, noth- 
ing laid down categorically as a gate to the 
Kingdom of Heaven. Christ seems to have 

89 



NOTES ON RELIGION 

regarded every man as a great saint, who 
needed no aids to devotion. The Kingdom of 
Heaven was within the man and would open 
up its own teaching as to such matters. Christ 
teaches us to regard one moment in Hfe as hke 
the next. His Kingdom of Heaven is always 
present. There are no porticos and approaches 
to it. 

The steps which people lay with so much 
expense to temples — always lead up sooner or 
later to brambles and ruin. But this temple of 
Christ's which has no visible portals is in- 
destructible. Nothing was ever so abstract as 
this idea. Time cannot get at it to destroy it. 
The truths of Christ are like fish that live in 
the veil of the waterfall and are as active as 
the stream. They elude the net. And this 
Kingdom, which does actually exist, is shown 
and opened to us more effectively by the ellip- 
tical sayings of Christ and the accidental anec- 
dotes about him than ever could have been 
done through any ritual or theology. Thus 
the practice of Christianity is easy. 



90 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: March 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



D 



r: r 



